philosophical conversations

Bergson & Deleuze

In concluding this essay Giovanna Borradori says:

In my reading, then, Deleuze's understanding of Nietzschean affirmation is the channel through which Bergson silently infiltrated poststructuralism. For the young Deleuze, Bergson represents the promise of a conceptual model able to account for all tensions escaping formal analysis. The possibility of twisting the "representationalism" regulating the structuralist framework depends, very broadly, on this promise.

I find this promising as it opens up a pathway out of the mechanist metaphysics of a hegemonic scientific materialism in modernity. Giovanna continues:

Poststructuralist thought inherits from Heidegger the notion that Western ontology is bound to a representationalist mode of thinking that attributes to concepts the function of re-presenting, or re-producing, a primitive presence, origin, or meaning. Bergson's emphasis on duration, and his connection between difference and duration, offers Deleuze a dynamic model based on heterogeneity and movement rather than simultaneity and juxtaposition. In "Bergson's Conception of Difference," Deleuze unfolds Bergson's potential as a critic of representationalism, reconcilable with Nietzsche and as an alternative to Heidegger. Since 1956 it is Bergson who has provided Deleuze with the tools to render difference irreducible. This is why I see the Bergsonian temporalization of difference as a major moment of coalescence of poststructuralism, assumed as pensée de la difference.

Tendencies become forces that are are antagonistic to each other and eventually powers.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 17, 2005 11:19 PM | TrackBack